Re: port-xen/52389: NetBSD EC2 images should use HVM with PV drivers

[Abhinav Upadhyay <er.abhinav.upadhyay%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 5:00 PM,  <bsiegert%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
>>Number:         52389
>>Category:       port-xen
>>Synopsis:       NetBSD EC2 images should use HVM with PV drivers
>>Confidential:   no
>>Severity:       serious
>>Priority:       medium
>>Responsible:    port-xen-maintainer
>>State:          open
>>Class:          change-request
>>Submitter-Id:   net
>>Arrival-Date:   Mon Jul 10 11:30:00 +0000 2017
>>Originator:     Benny Siegert
>>Release:
>>Organization:
> The NetBSD Foundation
>>Environment:
>>Description:
> From Colin Percival on port-xen@:
>
> I noticed a few days ago that the EC2 images you provide
>   https://wiki.netbsd.org/amazon_ec2/amis/
> and the build instructions
>   https://wiki.netbsd.org/amazon_ec2/build_your_own_ami/
> are for PV mode.  As a result, those images won't run on any of the
> modern EC2 instance types -- EC2 has moved to HVM (or more precisely,
> HVM with paravirtual and/or SR-IOV devices).
>
> If any of you want are interested in modernizing your EC2 offering, I'll
> be happy to help; as the maintainer of the FreeBSD/EC2 platform, I've
> probably tripped over many of the same issues you'll encounter.  And if
> we can get a better NetBSD offering in EC2, it might help to get them to
> stop classifying BSDs as "other Linux"...
>>How-To-Repeat:

I am interested in seeing this happen. I run a NetBSD instance in EC2
and my cost would be cut by half if we can manage to get HVM images
working.

I asked Colin Percival how FreeBSD does this, he told me to simply
build an amd64 image instead of a xen image and upload it. I tried
doing that but could not get it to boot, because of no boot loader
found error (I guess we still need an extra disk volume for GRUB). I
haven't found time since then to retry with an extra volume attached
for GRUB. Then it is also not clear if the network interfaces in HVM
instances are named the same way as in PV.

-
Abhinav